Indigenous Mapping Workshop, 2015

I feel so privileged to be in Kitchener this week at Google Canada Headquarters for the Indigenous Mapping Workshop hosted by Chiefs of Ontario, The Firelight Group and Google Outreach. And I’m grateful to my colleagues in the People of the Moose River Basin Historic Text and Mapping project for sending me, along with my Moose Factory colleague, Billy Isaac. It’s exciting to see so many people who are passionate about mapping traditional land use and traditional knowledge. This morning I felt even luckier to meet Shauna Morgan Siegers – who studied Cree at UofM with the late Freda Ahenakew, and her colleague Amanda Karst from Lebret, Saskatchewan (whose granny is a 97-year-old speaker of Métchif). Steve DeRoy, on the right, is one of our hosts, a co-founder of the Firelight Group, and a member of Manitoba’s Anishinaabe/Saulteaux Ebb and Flow First Nation. (Oh, and we’ve been meeting here in Google’s Darth Vader Room – I wonder what he paid for naming rights!)